Yenya's World

Thu, 27 Jul 2006

Hotmail and UTF-8

A new user of IS MU has redirected her e-mail to Hotmail [?], and complained that mail from IS MU
is not displayed correctly (the diacritical characters were wrong). I wondered
whether it was true, and even tried to create a Hotmail account for
testing purposes.

After accepting at least 50 cookies from their authentication service,
they have finally accepted my registeration. However, I could not log in,
the web site said some internal error message (I have tried it once again,
and it returned me back to the login screen). I then tried to use
MSIE from our remote desktop server, and I have been able to log in.
So it seems MSIE is the only browser allowed to access Hotmail.

I have sent a test mail to this new mailbox then. It contained
a text in Czech, and two words in Japanese (Katakana and Kanji).
It ended up in the spambox in my Hotmail account, and even there
it was not displayed correctly. So it seems that Hotmail cannot
correctly handle mail with Czech or Japanese language. I have not found
the "display all headers" option on Hotmail, so I cannot even verify if
the headers arrived correctly to Hotmail.

Moreover, the mail from that user of IS MU (sent from Hotmail) was
broken itself - it contained characters outside of US-ASCII, yet there
was no mention about the transfer encoding, MIME version, or character set
of the mail body in the headers. Talk about respecting the widely-accepted
well established standards.

I have recommended the user to use a different mail service, preferably somewhere
where they can be standards-compliant.